How to Be Popular Read Online Free PDF Page B

order to see a few shooting stars. I mean, this is why Grandpa built the observatory, for God’s sake.
    So the guilt? Not so much. Certainly not enough to go to confession about it or anything.
    Especially since, even if I did go to confession about it, Father Chuck will say something to my mother—I just know it. And then she’ll tell Kitty. And Kitty will tell her son, Dr. Hollenbach, who’ll tell Jason (or, at the very least, he’ll tell Jason to put his blinds down). And then I won’t get to see him anymore. Naked, I mean.
    And that would totally suck.
    Plus, you can’t tell me that what I’m doing is all THATwrong. Guys have been doing it to girls for hundreds—maybe thousands—of years. For as long as there’ve been windows and people changing in front of them—people who didn’t put down their blinds, anyway—there’ve been other people looking in those windows.
    It’s about time we girls had a little payback, is all I’m saying.
    And as much as it grieves me to report it, Jason regularly provides some fine, fine payback. I don’t know what he ate when he was in Europe, but he came back looking so hot! He didn’t have those biceps before he left. No way did he have those abs.
    Or maybe he did and I just never noticed.
    Of course, it’s not like, before he left, I was seeing Jason naked on a regular basis, either. It wasn’t until he moved into the attic, which happens to have a window I can see right into from our upstairs bathroom window, that I noticed I could see him.
    And people in my family wonder what I’m doing in the bathroom for so long. Like my little brother Pete, who just banged on the door.
    “What are you doing in there?” he wanted to know. “You’ve been in there an hour!”
    My big mistake was opening the door.
    “What do you want?” I asked. “Why aren’t you in bed?”
    “Because I gotta pee,” Pete said, barging past me and whipping it out. “Whadduya think?”
    “Ew,” I said. I seriously doubt Lauren Moffat has toput up with her little brothers peeing in front of her in her own home.
    Of course, Lauren probably has her own bathroom. She doesn’t have to share it with her four—soon-to-be five—siblings.
    “I told you I gotta go,” Pete said, clearly not caring about the psychological scars his being full-frontal in front of me could cause. He looked around, then went, “Hey. Why are you sitting here in the dark?”
    “I’m not,” I said. Even though the light in the bathroom was out. I could only see him from the moonlight, streaming in through the windows.
    “Uh, yeah, you are.” Pete finished up and flushed. “You’re really weird, you know that, Steph?”
    Um. Duh. “Go back to bed, moron.”
    “Who’s the moron?” Pete wanted to know.
    But he went back to bed. And didn’t notice the binoculars. Thank God.
    I guess I should try to be a little more understanding of what his—Pete’s—life must be like. Having the infamous Steph Landry for an older sister, I mean. Obviously, it must put him at a severe social disadvantage, at least in this town.
    And yet he’s borne it remarkably well…the teasing, the put-downs, the roughing up on the playground.
    The way I see it, things could be worse. I mean, there was this girl in school last year, Justine Yeager, who was an actual genius—she had a perfect grade point average and got the highest score you can get on her SATs, eventhe essay part. But she had like zero social skills—she was BOOK smart, but not PEOPLE smart. I mean, worse than accidentally throwing a Big Red Super Big Gulp on the most popular girl in school. No one would sit next to Justine at lunch, not even the B-crowders, because all she ever talked about was how much smarter she was than everybody else.
    So whenever things get really bad—like they are right now, when it’s the last Saturday night of summer vacation and instead of being out on a date or at a party or the lake or whatever, I’m sitting in the bathroom spying on